As expected, the government is responding to the ongoing Zika threat in typical reactionary form, calling for aerial chemicals to be blasted across our skies in an attempt to carpet-bomb the living daylights out of all mosquitoes. But based on what’s known about these chemicals, many are wondering about the appropriateness of such tactics since they stand to destroy other creatures as well, like the honeybees that we rely on for food.
In a recent write-up for OC Weekly magazine, Mary Carreon explains what Orange County, California, is proposing in this same vein as a solution to the Zika threat, and why it’s a disaster for our vital pollinators. The suburban enclave could soon follow the lead of nearby San Diego and Los Angeles Counties in sending small airplanes stocked with Duet, a type of mosquito insecticide, to blanket neighborhoods with the mosquito-killing poison.
As it turns out, this poison is immensely harmful to both animals and pets, and Carreon warns that it’s essentially toxic to “everything.” Anything that lives, in essence, is negatively affected by Duet, which makes spraying it indiscriminately, as Orange County officials hope to do, a crime against humanity and life itself. And as to how the solution affects bees and pollinators specifically, Orange County Vector Control admits that it “may be toxic upon direct exposure.”
Any creature that comes into direct contact with Duet mist droplets is at risk because that’s how the chemical works: toxicity through direct contact. Authorities say spraying at night when mosquitoes are out in full force, but when honeybees and butterflies are supposedly “not active,” protects against mass poisoning, both in animals and humans, but not everyone is convinced.
“Levels of exposure … as a result of aerial spraying are inherently unpredictable,” says Dr. Bruce Blumberg, a professor of developmental and cell biology and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, Irvine. “Therefore, exposure to all pesticides should be minimized or avoided, rather than encouraged.”
Duet mosquito spray harmful to humans, animals, insects, and yes, honeybees
What government officials are failing to tell the public about the nature of Duet is that its mechanistic action works the same way in both animals and humans. On a physiological and anatomical level, Dr. Blumberg added in an interview with OC Weekly, “we have all of the same organs and organ systems, which perform the same functions in nearly an identical way.”
Duet is likewise harmful to fish and other aquatic organisms, a fact openly admitted by its manufacturer alongside the claim that such toxicity is nil in the “small amounts” used during spraying. But Dr. Blumberg disagrees, and for good reason: nobody knows exactly how much Duet is being sprayed and where it ends up because it’s not a controlled amount when sprayed in large plumes from an airplane.
Why Orange County, which barely has any mosquitoes anyway, is pushing to go chemical crazy rather than advise people to simply use a safe insect repellent like the Health Ranger’s Bugs Away spray seems to be the question of the hour. But one thing’s for sure: Duet isn’t the answer, especially if humanity wants to keep on living in the long term — and neither are the many other pesticides and herbicides cited in a 22-page report on colony collapse disorder (CCD) entitled Honeybees and Pesticides: State of the Science.
“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left,” physicist Albert Einstein once stated. “No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”
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